By Crispina Lois Cummings
Two ruling party members of parliament have accused the telecommunications regulator, NATCOM, of “failing to monitor service providers and their equipment" in line with their statutory mandate.
Addressing mobile phone company executives at a parliamentary committee hearing on Wednesday, the MPs, Sheku Sannoh and Karifala Conteh described NATCOM as “the sole cause of the poor quality network in the country", singling out AIRTEL for “extorting money from their customers for services they do not render”.
The MPs, both engineers by profession with experience in the telecommunications industry, also dismissed excuses of lack of power by the service providers. According to Hassan Sesay, MP, despite all “your constraints, you are still in business, charging and receiving money”.
He accused the mobile phone companies of “having no regard for customer service”.
Earlier the managing director of Airtel, Sudipto Chowdhury, said his company was “facing challenges over power supply and not enough spectrum space”.
His counterpart at Africell, Shadi Gerjawi, said “we have put in place new equipment to enhance our clarity but we are awaiting tests”.
For his part network quality manager at Comium, Dr Samba Sesay, said “the company is facing huge financial challenges right now and we have a lot of loans and license fees to service. That is why right now you can't make calls from Comium to Africel because we have to pay large debts”.
Dr Sesay promised that by the end of March the company’s 101 sites would be “steady and running and most of our debts would have been handled”.
The deputy chairman of NATCOM, Saidu Turay, said his commission had procured monitoring equipment which they would bring in very soon to improve on monitoring.
Senessi Kallon, also from NATCOM said they had made spectrum space available to Comium and Airtel but that “the companies should work on their capacity frequency”. He said NATCOM had fined the companies in the past, but was careful not to throw them out of business.
Chairman of the parliamentary oversight committee on information Binneh Bangura, MP, is expected to report back to parliament today, 6 March.
The mobile phone companies were summoned to parliament after the Speaker, SBB Dumbuya, told the House that mobile telephone communication services in the country “are in shambles”.
(C) Politico 06/03/14
